Blog Hop

What book(s) have you discovered lately from someone's blog?

Between podcasts and my occasional reading of blogs, I would have to say the book that I have discovered is Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly. 



What book influenced or changed your life?  How did it influence/change you?

The book that influenced/changed my life was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson.  They influenced/changed me because they changed my reading habits.  Prior to reading those two books, especially Jacob Have I Loved, I was primarily reading pulp fiction and wasn't reading books that didn't have any sort of literary value, ie The Babysitters Club.  I had to change my reading habits because the school I was attending didn't have that great of a library and there were no Babysitter Club books (if there were any, there weren't many available).  Anything that I liked to read wasn't available to me and at the time, the public library didn't have a great system for requesting books. In otherwords, I had to ask the library staff to request a particular book from within the system and I wasn't exactly able to tell if they had a book that I wanted to read.  It wasn't a great era for young adult literature and most of it was books that were either too young for me to read (I had already read all of the Little House books by this time) or were way above me in terms of reading ability.   As a result I started to read more adult literature and by the time I was half-way through my first year of high school in Grade 8,  I had read half of Les Miserable (the unabridged version) and had fallen in love with Jane Eyre, after starting it one night after my sister had broken her collarbone while skiing one evening and forced to wait for her in the waiting room and nothing else for me to do.